Google now lets you Van Gogh and Da Vinci your photographs… sort of

A touch of Prisma, with big name artists

Wanted to make your photographs look like something out of a classic art gallery? Well. Google now gives you the option to do so. The search giant recently updated its Arts & Culture app, which is basically dedicated to giving information about and access to works of art all over the world. One of the new features that it comes with is the ability to transform your photographs into works of art. Well, sort of.

The feature, which is called Art Transfer, has been rolled out to both iOS and Android versions of the app. To access it, all you need to do it tap on the camera icon on the launch screen of the app and choose Art Transfer, which appears at the very top of the options available.

You can either take a photograph through the app or choose an existing one. It is then that you get the option to make your picture appear in a style similar to more than twenty classic works of art, including Van Gogh’s “Self Portrait,” Andy Warhol’s “Self Portrait”, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, and of course Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” You can choose to apply the art effects to the entire picture, or just a part of it and well, can share it as a JPG or even a GIF (which shows the photograph morphing into the artwork, kind of cool).

We have seen apps that try to make photographs look like sketches and paintings before, most notably Prisma. But this is one of the rare times when the attempt has been to make a photograph look like a well-known work of art. We have tried it on a few photographs and to be honest, if you are expecting the kind of detailed morphing from photograph to canvas that you get in Prisma or even Paper Camera, you will be disappointed. In most cases, it almost feels as if the painting has been laid over the photograph itself – best results seem to come when you use a photograph that is somewhat similar to the painting you want it to resemble (so a portrait for the Mona Lisa, perhaps).